Monday, 10 May 2010

Having been a die hard fan of the second edition of CLR via C#, couldn't wait to get hold of the third edition. The third edition keeps up to the Jeffrey standard on covering from the basics to the internals of .NET 4.0 with C# 4.0. Starting with the rather interesting foreword by his wife, this book can be read end to end if you are already comfortable with .NET and have enough time to read through ~850 pages of pure core stuff.

There is so much of deep insight in most of the pages that it might take some time to absorb stuff. The best recommendation to attack this book is to read one chapter a day while preparing notes. Once you are done with the book, your notes together with the book can be one hell of a reference at any point. If there is only one book you read as a .NET developer, this is it. Even if you have been the best .NET developer of your league, each time you read this book there is something new learnt. This book covers a good wide area of .NET topics, sometimes delving deep too.

Sharing Richter's deep experience and know-how of .NET in plain non-geeky language has worked out well. Additionally, there are various tips and notes provided in the boxes and shaded text that are pure gems. Richter has made sure that the reader is thoroughly introduced to CLR concepts and in turn how things work out from the C# layer to the IL layer. Richter had made sure that most discussed basic stuff like hashcodes, interface v/s class, explicit v/s implicit interface definitions are discussed to a level such that no further questions arise. There are various instances where he has provided guidance on what to use and why, while sometimes providing historical background to these decisions.

There is good introduction to advanced topics like application domains in the context of hosting. With multicore and concurrency the talk of the town, new to 3rd edition are the 5 new chapters dedicated to discussion on threads and related classes in .NET. Discussion on TPL, PLINQ, spinning and locking etc are dealt quite thoroughly.

At the end of the book you would feel a better .NET developer, ready to take on your next development task in a more elegant manner - believe me.